My (thankfully distant) memories of PL/SQL suggest that most of the time it has what you need to be able to get from point A to point B. That doesn't impress me.

What first impressed me about Perl was the fact that it consistently had ways to not just get from point A to point B, but it had ways to express the problem and answer that were far cleaner than the kludge that I would have thought up on my own.

So while PL/SQL generally had, somewhere, the minimum I needed, Perl typically had what I wanted, even if I didn't know it at the time.

Therefore I would suggest that newbies to Perl should take the attitude that somewhere in Perl or on CPAN there is an approach to this problem that you really want to use, you just don't know about it yet...

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.